Pretty much this. I’m fairly certain that I read years ago that Gabe just wasn’t interested as well. Which fair enough valve don’t need to develop games now because they have to but because they want to.
This is the correct answer I think. They’re also not interested in releasing sub-par games, and again like you say they don’t need to release games at all to make money anymore. So if they’re not that interested and haven’t come up with anything conceptually/mechanically that reaches the high bar they’ve set for themselves, it makes more sense to scrap/postpone.
Their reputation is much more important, and they’re just not going to half-ass Half Life 3. It will come out when they feel they have something truly extraordinary, or it won’t come out at all.
They seem to release these games as some sort of tech demo show showcasing what they see is the future of games. One has the set peice structure of game design, two was the physics engine, and Alex was VR. So other then the continuation of the time line, half life Alex pretty much was half life three. Also they know the hype/meme train has been building for so long that nothing will be good enough. Like Duke nukem.
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he’s the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He’s made some poor choices interacting with the community.
Yes, it’s probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.
The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.
They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government
Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything? I’m more concerned about Valve having a separate Steam client for China, censoring their games specifically for China and even reportedly banning for bringing up Winnie the Pooh.
Most investments aren’t to gain influence but to profit. At this time, there is no sign of Epic doing anything that could be explained by the alleged influence of the Chinese government, and as the majority owner, Tim Sweeney has the final say anyway.
I never said it was not for profit. I said you invest to gain influence, which is true by fact, not an opinion. If I buy a significant number of shares in a company, I do so because I want more than money; I want influence on decision-making. I do not think the Chinese government is only interested in monetary gains; do you think that’s their only goal?
And again, do you believe a country/government able to indoctrinate any business that wants a share of their market, like the Steam example, is only invested for monetary gains and nothing else?
Tim Sweeney can do and decide many things, but opposing the Chinese government is certainly not one. And I don’t know how you imagine influence, but having 40% of a company is something I call influence, wouldn’t you? Even if they can’t tell him how to run the business, he sure as hell will do nothing that could worsen the relationship between him and his biggest investor, aka Tencent. And who is behind Tencent? The Chinese government.
It’s all in the realm of “what if”. Sure, it could attempt this or that, but it hasn’t, nor is there any guarantee that it would fly. That just brings me back to the original point of when a company that is not partially owned by the Chinese actively works to please the Chinese government to further their business interest but I don’t see much of that with Epic. If you look at some of the other companies in which Tencent has a large stake, like Dontnod, there’s absolutely no sign of the Chinese agenda in the games either.
Yes, and you are entitled to your own opinion, but that does not change the facts. No, the influence is not “what if it is there” – it is there, plain and simple. That’s not up for discussion. It’s public knowledge that Tencent owns 40%, and Tencent is a government-controlled entity. It does not matter if they “abuse/use” it actively or not. It sounds like, in your mind, influence is only relevant when you use it actively, which is not true.
They’re also just plain unethical. There’s never been a government as insidious as the CCP in exploiting vulnerable foreign nations like South Africa or South East Asia thru incentives that are basically just a debt trap.
I don’t disagree with everything you said here but come on, Steam is basically a privately owned PC games store monopoly that has now been going on for 25 years. Since it’s not public we can’t really know for sure but there’s a very real possibility that Epic is the underdog here
Epic doesn’t make nearly as much money from Fortnite’s players as steam makes from their users though. Same for UE royalties. I don’t think there’s a single UE license that has a 30% rev share (which is what you get on steam if you don’t have big AAA sales). Hell, I don’t even think there’s one at 10%.
Steam doesn’t have anti competitive behavior yet. Gabe has made some bad decisions in the past (may I remind you that he greenlit Bethesda’s paid mods idea ?) but he does seem to generally put the users first. But what happens after him ? Imo the company will go public at some point, and it’s pretty much downhill from here
Horse armor was a dlc, not a mod (well, there were also joke mods), and it was for oblivion. They tested the paid mods on Skyrim back in 2015 (Bethesda is apparently having another try right now, although it looks like valve is out of the picture this time). Officially implemented on the steam workshop and all, and obviously valve was supposed to get a cut out of every sale which is probably why they were A-OK with it
Steam somehow prevents publishers from selling games at a cheaper price in competitors’ stores, even if their cut from the store is lower. That is extremely anti-competitive and has to be illegal.
If you sign up to use Steam to distribute your game then one of the things you agree to is to make it available on Steam at the same price you offer anywhere else. This protects Steam’s business and ensures that Steam customers aren’t disadvantaged.
However, it also applies even if the alternative channels don’t make use of Steam directly (e.g selling on Epic). This is where the Wolfire Games lawsuit comes in. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
Pretty much every single decision you can see from their history since the inception of EGS is either stupid or blatantly destructive to gaming industry. Just some examples: better revenue shares for developers? Sure but this translates into worse platform. Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers? Sure but the game is then stuck at the platform that gives no means for users to interact and let developers know how they could improve their product. Cross platform multiplayer platform that works? Sure but then we have to deal with stupid requirements like having an account on additional platforms we may not want to use, even to play single player modes sometimes.
You can also check Tim’s Twitter and see how ignorant and hypocritical he is. I wouldn’t mind it but his decisions seem to actually affect the whole platform and therefore the industry so… too bad.
Don't forget how he abandoned PC gaming when Unreal Tournament 3 bombed after they released shitty mid tools and the modding community they built up over UT 2k3 and 2k4 dissolved.
better revenue shares for developers?
Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers?
It actually goes to publishers, so the only way devs see that extra cut is by self-publishing. So I guess for smaller indie devs it can be a good deal.
Elder millennial, here. One of the weird things about the 90s was cereal boxes marketed to little bastards like me at the time would often have some kind of toy included in it.
PC gaming was kind of in its infancy and growing rapidly in popularity, so eventually the inevitable happed: a cereal company promoted their cereal by shoving a fucking CD into it, that little bastards like me lost their shit over, installed, and played the snot out of.
Cornflakes is cereal. AoE is Age of Empires, you might have heard about it. The comment I replied to was talking about games being released in cereal boxes. Where is the context lacking?
That had to be wild to work on. You get brought into the kickoff meeting for what you assume is going to be some soulless marketing gimick, then they start laying it out.
It had a plot, a decent amount of levels. There was a good amount of heart that went into that.
Hades! Whenever you die, you get reborn in the “house” of your father Hades. Dying and being reborn is an integral part of this game and is what keeps the story going. You also get to upgrade and unlock weapons that way. Highly recommend this game if you like fastpaced and smartly designed action games!
That’s basically true of all roguelites, right? The whole genre is built around the idea of playing through, dying, and coming back stronger so you can go farther. I’m thinking Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, The Binding of Isaac etc. etc.
I played Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells combined at least 150h and only a bit of BOI. I know that in RL the shtick is that with every new run another one of your family is the character. And in Dead Cells you just use a new body every run. The stories in those games aren’t very elaborate and the games would just be as good as they are without story.
Hades is different in that the story parts of the game are an important part of the experience (you go around and get to know a lot of different characters and find different ways to upgrade stuff) and that the main character Zagreus doesn’t really die - he is also a god. When you lose all hp you just get transported back to Hades and almost everyone there has new tings to say and the relationships develop over time.
I don’t know how to explain it better but the main idea of a roguelite is clearly there the execution is way more elaborate and story heavy than RL, DC or BOI. Slay the Spire is on my imaginary backlog of games in need to play before I die.
Yup, was just Steam DRM. There’s universal tools to crack that. Less so “you can’t play our game unless you spend money” and more “it’s slightly inconvenient to install this way, innit? Why don’t you go buy it instead, bruv?”
exploration in the game is unfortunately weak in many aspects; This is due to the large reliance on procedural generation of environments. Also, the role-playing elements do not have a strong presence or impact.
I was really hoping proc-gen would be just for the terrain and surrounding areas and the interesting setpieces would be as handcrafted (or as close as possible) to a regular TES/Fallout experience. I guess they had to trade in a lot of these to make the big universe happen though...
That’s how they described it, too. Oh Todd you done it again!
Looks like there’s not much to do on the planets. One review even said the classic “get lost on the way and end up doing ten other things” just doesn’t happen in this game anywhere. It can happen in a city, but then they also said the cities are pretty meh.
I really hope I’m wrong about this in five years, but it looks like No Man’s Sky did even more damage to the space sim genre than we thought. We’re in a year with great handcrafted experiences that still feel vast: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, even Everspace 2 in a similar setting (and Everspace 2 wouldn’t have had the same, fatal loading screen issue if it was a AAA game). Starfield went the other direction.
By chasing the procedural generation dream, from everything I’ve seen, Bethesda really hamstrung the space exploration to get there. Fortunately I really like the old Bethesda formula, so hopefully the Skyrim/Fallout experience that’s still there will be enough for me to want to put hundreds of hours into it. I’m just hoping developers don’t keep trying to do this for games in space settings.
It sounds like No Man’s Sky. You’re supposed to be able to explore the whole galaxy and see many creatures, environments, etc but they all end up being the same so exploration is boring, at least to me it was
I felt similarly. Exploring is just another thing to "do" to get credits/nanites. It was cool to see genuinely new things like the huge Dune-styled worms but once you see one you've seen them all.
That extends to base building too. I have no reason to build a base anywhere else in the galaxy once I have a capital ship that does all my crafting for me. Except resource collecting, I guess. But meh, different strokes for different folks. I don't think there's been a non-MMO continually-updated game that I've come back to as often as NMS but coming back is usually pretty short-lived.
This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.
You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.
variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you’ve effectively seen everything. Sure, you’ll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants… but when you see all the “tricks” the veil falls.
That’s what makes this even more of an issue. The game isn’t procedural. They used procedural tooling but everything is set in stone now. They could’ve gone through and cleaned up and tweaked everything so it didn’t feel bland. Doesn’t sound like they did.
I knew the writing/rpg aspect was going to be shallow like all of Bethesda games but, they always had fun exploration so this is unfortunate to me. It sounds like they reuse assets a lot, even in the main quest line. Like same buildings with the same enemy placement just on a different planet.
It's definitely a Bethesda game. Their dialogue choices and roleplaying has always been shit. People like Bethesda games primarily because they're given a large open world to explore. But they made most of this one procedurally generated so they've lost their main good quality. I really hope the players are pushed by the stories and side quests to the hand-crafted worlds and the procedurally generated are mostly in the background for players that want to go off the beaten path.
I tried to make a comment about this in a different thread. Only you can control how you wanna spend your energy every day. Stop giving it to being angry at them all day. Unless there is something you can do to take actual action its just ruining your day with no real change taking place.
My father has requested that the family only talk to him about politics if there is something he can do. A petition to sign. A protest to mount. Something. Otherwise he doesn’t want to hear what Trump and his lackey’s are up to because he knows he can’t do anything about it and letting it ruin his daily mental health does him no good.
It's hard not to when the man who just did two nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration is also trying to insert himself into our gaming spaces. We don't want nazis in our communities.
It’s not hard at all, you choose what you allow to take root in your mind. Additionally, I disagree that that’s what he did; his motion was not an actual heil, and I feel that labeling it as such without better evidence continues the unfortunate trend of dilution powerful words. I don’t think a conversation on this topic will yield anything meaningful, so I’m not going to elaborate further, but I wanted to present an opposing opinion.
Ok, you lost any credibility your original words had when you said it wasn’t a hitler salute. It clearly was. I wish I knew how to post video here. It’s a 2 second video, and it’s clearly a hitler salute.
They shouldn’t hold any credibility in the first place, I’m just some faceless username. I already saw the video, that’s what my opinion is based on. I say his hand’s angle and movement are quite different from a heil, but if you want to disagree, that’s fine as well.
I’m saying that a lot of people would consider it to start with “L”. I think it’s common to say “Legend of Zelda”, and even LoZ to refer to the series.
Cali is a hit or miss, the Cali privacy reg has been so watered down compared to the GDPR it feels like the ad industry got it in to prevent future harsher regulations.
If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you’ll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.
Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place’s secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don’t understand, so you’ll just have to leave it for later, when you’ve learned more puzzle mechanics. It’s like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.
All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.
definitely scratches the same itch more than games like the talos principle. there’s like one group it completely fails to properly tutorialize imo, and one that kind of falls short (although having played the witness will make your assumptions more accurate i think). other than that it’s a brilliant game.
While I agree having more options is always a better thing, I really can’t see body type A and B with pronouns choosing anything other than more inclusive, a good thing, and not something that deserves getting up in arms about.
I don’t really see how it could be seen as not more inclusive. Sure it’s not more inclusive than having full blown sliders that let you change every bit of a character’s body, but it’s adding more pronouns and not forcing those pronouns on a certain body type. If we look at number of options, it is more than the previous “male and female” options. Thus including a broader set of people
My issue is how half-assed the measure is. What’s the point of letting me pick between “He/Him” and “She/Her”, if it’s going on a character that looks like a stereotypical brodude or a model in a fashion magazine? Is it really doing anyone any favors?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him? If there was more variety or perhaps something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 where you can have a masculine build with feminine features or vice versa, I could see the point… but for most games that are only going to give you the most common denominator as your only two options?
It just feels like throwing a coat of paint to make it look like the studio cares about making their product more accessible, when really it’s just trying to check a box to appease HR.
It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s so small that it’s insulting to everyone involved.
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
I think so. Why not? There are as many valid genders and identities as there are people in the world. Who am I to judge what people want to be referred as? Also even if there wasn’t people like that, I can almost guarantee there are people who would want to put a “they/them” to those body types, which seems to be the main point of this body type trend.
I don’t see it as a bad faith thing to be like “hey, we should include the ability for NB people to have their preferred pronouns”
Again, I agree that having more options would be better, but why does perfect have to be the enemy of good?
Edit: I also want to say that NB does not equal androgenous. Sure many NB people may desire or have an androgenous look. But I also know people who like to look and be feminine but are still NB, and the other way around
The reason why perfect is an enemy of good in this particular circumstance because the message it gives off now is “We care about buzzwords”, with just a little more effort, it could be “We care about inclusion.”
As it stands now, I’m just left rolling my eyes because game studios see me as not a woman, but as “Body Type B”, but if we had some more androgynous options alongside itl, it’d come across more… “Oh I CAN have a feminine build if I WANT to.”
I guess I just really don’t see it that way. Man and woman and “she/her” and “he/him” are so much more than the way a body looks. Like someone could be the most traditionally culturally masculine looking person and go by she/her. That’s valid, that’s fine.
I don’t see it as the studio not seeing you as a woman. I am somewhat confused by that statement. Like you get the ability to choose she /her with a couple body options. The she / her is the woman here no? They recognize it as a thing. You can look however. I mean fuck I certainly don’t have a body type B, but I’m still a woman
Thing is I definitely don’t look like the “Type B”, but my other option is “Type A”, which is something so blatantly masculine in every way that it would be insulting for me to represented as such, and I guarantee any other trans woman would feel that same in that scenario.
As another trans woman, I just have to say you do not speak for all trans women. I have met sooooo many trans women whose idea of transness are much different to my own. It’s so broad and expansive there are no absolutes here
@HawlSera@chloyster I mean, I absolutely know people who use she/her but present very masc, and vise-versa. They may be relatively uncommon, but so are trans people in general and we're still worth representing. Not to mention non-binary people who have relatively binary gender presentation. Your experience is absolutely not universal.
I am a tomboy, I present very masc, and it does annoy me when as a consequence people mistake me for a guy despite the fact that I obviously have breasts… But that is what it is…
But what I’m getting at is most Body Type A options don’t allow me to play a masc-presenting woman, but a masc-presenting man as in “Someone who looks like Leonidas on Steroids”. If Body Type A regularly allowed you to play as a masc-presenting woman I’d see your point.
The option to play someone like Zarya rarely if ever exists, whereas the option to play as someone who looks like Kratos is overwhelmingly what Body A refers to.
@HawlSera I do recognize that tomboys, buff women, etc are worth representing, (and we should push for their inclusion) but that's not what I'm talking about - I mean people who look like "men" but use pronouns other than he/him.
In agile development. You do a little, release. Otherwise it is too big and may never be done. The fact they committed resources to improve this is a positive. The hope is they build on it and add more options.
However, if they get trashed for trying, they and many other companies may not try. Why spend money to get a bad reputation when the spending nothing creates less I’ll will to the company. That is ultimately the decision Product Owners and Designers will weigh up.
I think for progress, the best approach is maybe “positive first step but more options are needed for non-bonary for this to really make players feel comfortable”.
From a technical perspective, separating pronoun hard coding from the models gives more scope to give more options in the future, however, as someone mentioned, there is a lot of art work needed on assets and animations so the new shapes function the same in all cases.
To be clear, your stance is it’s such a small step in the right direction, you’d prefer no step at all? Keep it cis-only or invest time/money in extra character models?
I’m not saying keep it cis-only, I apologize if that’s implied, pronoun selection is fine and I don’t have a problem with that. My issue is if we’re not going to offer more options than simply two body types, both based on super idealized and gender stereotyped versions of the male and female form… Can we have a less awkward thing to call it than “Body Type A/Body Type B”?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
Not sure what you mean by “good faith” here, but I can assure you there are some he/him dudebros that play female characters bc if you’re gonna be staring at someone in 3rd person the entire game it might as well be someone attractive to you.
Also it’s perhaps a minority of gamers, but people with fewer identity issues don’t need to see themselves as a self insert for their character, so why not play someone totally different from you?
I basically mean, who intentionally picks an overly masculine character unambigiously male character with female pronouns? Because that’s really only a thing in transphobic far right political cartoons.
I could see people picking the “female” character with he/him pronouns if they wanted to play a femboy and there wasn’t really an option to make the male character look “pretty”, but the “male” character with she/her, I dunno about that one chief.
WhatbI don’t get is why they are using body type A/1 and B/2. One is clearly feminine and the other masculine, regardless of the gender of the character, why not use those words? They are describing the physical form of the body, it says nothing about gender.
Unless you’ve installed some very particular mods, the body types in most video games do not contain genitals, and therefore are not definitively male nor female.
I have boobs and a butt. My body looks like “Body B” from these games. It is not a female body. It does not have a vagina. I have a surgery planned, and that surgery will not result in a vagina. What I’m hearing right now is that you think my body is female. And that makes me feel uncomfortable because I do not want a female body. A feminine body, I am happy with, but not female. I choose “Body B” in these games because it looks like my body, which I am happy with. I do not choose it because it’s “female”. I feel a little bit of pain every time I have to click on female.
…they literally said “feminine” and “masculine”, not “male” or “female”. Specifically using language you say you’re okay with, but still prompting this response. What exactly is your problem with what they said?
No, but we still see models that largely either have bulges or camel toes.
Seeing a buff, hairy, bulge-having individual labeled “she/her” is typically only done in transphobic alt-right political cartoons and it feels a little tone deaf that game companies actually expect transpeople to unironically go with that…
What I’m hearing right now is that you think my preference to have a character that looks like me in video games isn’t worth pursuing because of camel toes, and because a troll might conceivably use the same features that help me, to make a character you don’t like. I already told you the nonbinary perspective on this issue. I’d just like to take a moment before I offer counterarguments to ask… what on earth is your intention with offering these arguments?
Now, as to camel toes: I cannot remember ever seeing a visible camel toe on a character in a video game. Maybe this is just because I don’t make a habit of staring at the crotches of women and femmes in games. But if I did notice a camel toe in a video game that was not about sex, my first thought would be “what the fuck game developers” and I would immediately be on the look out for misogyny in other aspects of the game. Maybe I’m completely off base here and I’ve actually been playing characters with camel toes this entire time and not realised it because I’m not a creep. But in that case, revealing this information to me would increase the gender dysphoria I feel in these games. Why do you want to do that?
And as for trolls? I saw someone in this thread respond to you say they like bearded ladies. You might have read that as a joke, but it wasn’t. Popular streamer JoCat is also a fan of bearded ladies, and I know this because he was cancelled by a bunch of TERFs for playing one in Baldur’s Gate while singing a controversial song. He decided to quit making his YouTube videos because of the harassment. JoCat is not a transphobe. He’s used his platform to raise money for LGBTQ charities in the past, and he was previously embedded quite firmly in the queer D&D youtubers community, friends with a lot of queer people who had nothing but positive things to say about him. I think that you’re confusing your trauma around transphobic representations with other genuine queer people who just wanna live as themselves, and you’re circling back around to transphobia as a result.
While I don’t personally agree with OP, I still believe that they are discussing in good faith. I see nothing here that says they think NB people are “alt right trolls”. Our rule here is to be(e) nice. Please don’t resort to unfounded personal attacks
Actually if you read what I said, I’d say part of my problem is that having two character models one that is “Unambiguously Male” and one that is “Unambiguously Female” while claiming “Oh you can just choose your pronouns, and we didn’t actually say Male or Female! So it’s fine” is a lazy solution that does more to annoy than to assist.
And that if they were actually serious about being more respectful to the wider gender spectrum that exists in real life, they’d have more than just those two options. But the concern dev studios have is not in helping gender non-conforming individuals be more immersed in games, it’s to say “I’m with the current trendy thing, upvotes to the left.”
We need to be critical of what’s called “Rainbow Capitalism/Pink Capitalism” or we’ll be stuck without any real meaningful change.
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